by Nicole Auerbach, USA TODAY Sports

by Nicole Auerbach, USA TODAY Sports

CHARLOTTE - Ryan Lochte looks at the steering wheel of his 2014 Range Rover, furrows his brow and pauses. He pulls out his cell phone and plugs the sandwich shop's address into an app that tracks GPS. He's given up.

"When I first moved here, I tried not to use the GPS for anything so I could learn how to get around," Lochte says. "But then I realized I just kept getting lost everywhere. I'd be late for practice, get a call, and I'd be like, 'I think I'm in Georgia.' "

He laughs.

The swimmer still thinks of himself as the new guy in town, but by now, he's been a Charlotte resident for about nine months. In many ways, it's been one of the most challenging stretches of his life. He's moved away from home and family for the first time, leaving the college-town lifestyle and its temptations. He's changed coaches and, with that, his training regimen. He's suffered multiple injury setbacks, including a significant knee injury that kept him out of the pool for months and had him contemplating quitting the sport.

But he's still here. He's still swimming. He has his eye on the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where he's hoping to add to the 11 Olympic medals he already owns. But the immediate future is more pressing: U.S. national championships this week in Irvine, Calif., and the Pan Pacific Championships in Australia later this month. These two meets will determine the U.S. team for next year's world championships.

They'll also be proving ground for Lochte, coming off a year full of challenges and change. Over the course of an all-access week with USA TODAY Sports this summer, he reflects on a time that's forced him to grow up, as a swimmer and as a man.

***

After winning five medals, including two gold, and being declared one of the nation's newest heartthrobs in London, Lochte transitioned from world-class swimmer to celebrity - and the E! reality series,What Would Ryan Lochte Do? was a big reason. Friends say despite the show being canceled after one season, Lochte's popularity soared. So did the amount of extracurricular activities.

"I'm not going to lie, it was amazing," Lochte says. "If you're a swimmer, you don't go to a red carpet event for a movie premiere. You're not hanging out with Sylvester Stallone. You're like, 'What am I doing? This is unbelievable.' I never thought swimming would take me that far. But at the same time, I almost quit swimming that year, especially when my show happened. I never swam during my show. I tried to. We tried to play it off during the show, but I couldn't. if I'm going to do something, I'm going to go do it. I'm going to go all in.

"It was hard doing all these celebrity things, doing the show, because you get sucked into that lifestyle, the idea of being that celebrity. You can get sucked in so easily. I was like, 'Nah, I don't want to do it, I don't want to swim anymore.' "

Lochte says he regrets that he didn't emphasize swimming or training during the show. He also acknowledges that the image the show projected - that of an overgrown frat boy - wasn't ideal.

"I did it because I wanted to do it; I had a blast doing it," Lochte says. "It was probably not a good decision to do it while I was swimming and how it made me turn out to be. But the best thing about that was it made me and my family closer. You can say I'm a party boy, whatever, but I don't care because when it comes down to it, family is the only thing that matters in my life. They're the ones that help me through everything."

They're also the reason he's returned to form as a swimmer. After the lack of training and a disappointing performance at the Mesa Grand Prix in April 2013 - "the worst I ever swam in my entire life," Lochte says - he considered quitting. His family members and then-longtime coach Gregg Troy convinced him not to give up on the pool. He had just a couple of months to train for nationals and worlds.

"Those months were the best I've ever had in training," says Lochte, who earned two individual gold medals at the worlds. "I was zeroed in to swimming 100%, nothing else. Every practice, I made sure it was perfect. I had to, otherwise I wouldn't have made it. It was still a sloppy year."

***

Last summer was also when Lochte began mulling the idea of moving. He'd been training with Gregg Troy in Gainesville, Fla., for 12 years - and won 11 Olympic medals under Troy's tutelage - but had also decided he was ready to make a change.

One of his best friends, Cullen Jones, had been training with David Marsh and SwimMAC in Charlotte since 2008. Lochte was drawn to the program for multiple reasons: He'd be around a group of post-grad swimmers training together for national/international competition instead of college swimmers; and he could focus on technique work and improve his shorter-distance events under Marsh's watchful eye.

He hadn't told Marsh any of that, not until he showed up in Charlotte and gave the coach a call - and a bit of a surprise.

"I'm here," Lochte told Marsh.

"Does this mean you're staying?" Marsh replied.

The two met and drove around Charlotte. Lochte saw the Queens University pool where he'd train and a bit of the city where he'd grow outside of the pool.

"Part of it was getting away, making the transition in life away from Florida," Marsh says. "He may have initially thought it was a swimming move, but I'm not sure it was a swimming move. It was an emotional move as much as a swimming move."

And Marsh has tried to encourage the emotional growth that comes along with it. He connects Lochte with local pro athletes, those who understand the trappings of fame, money and athletic success, and also with Jeremy Boone, a Charlotte-based sports performance consultant. Lochte and Boone meet regularly for lunch or kayaking to discuss anything from swimming to relationships (Lochte is single) to outside interests.

"(David) doesn't want me just to be a more mature swimmer in the water. He wants me to be a more mature swimmer out of the water, too, taking things into my own hands," Lochte says. "Before, I always had a coach be like, 'Ryan you're doing this, you're doing that, you can't say anything about it, this is how it's going to be' - his way or the highway. I was down with that. I learned how to swim like that. Now, (David) wants me to do so well in swimming, but he also wants me to do so well outside of the sport."

Jones sees it, too. He sees it in the way Lochte allocates his time, the way he presents himself when he's out in public, the way he handles all the fan attention.

"He's maturing, for sure," Jones says. "He had to."

***

In the pool, Marsh tries not to do too much.

"I was at Auburn in the early '80s when Bo (Jackson) was there," says Marsh, who won 12 national championships while coaching at Auburn. "Bo was such a natural athlete. His baseball/football coaches, a lot of what they had to do was not get in Bo's way. They would have to let him do some things and some basics, but other than that, let him express himself as the natural athlete he is. That's how I see Ryan, where he has a really incredible relationship with the water.

"I was teammates with Rowdy Gaines in college. He was a lot like that. Rowdy is the kind of guy where, to this day, if he's not in water on a daily basis, Rowdy is off-kilter. I think Ryan is going to find that in his life, too. He's going to need to be physically in the water to be himself."

Marsh calls Lochte "almost a half-otter" in the water. Things come easier, faster and more naturally to Lochte than other swimmers, he says.

Lochte began training with Marsh in the fall, but he wasn't always in Charlotte. He traveled back and forth to Florida, and to and from other outside commitments. But at the time he truly started to settle into the training, he suffered a major setback in the form of a freak injury. He tore his left MCL and sprained his ACL during a fan encounter in Florida on Nov. 1. He decided against surgery, which might have meant the end of his breaststroke career.

"That was a big step back for him because he is so used to being able to go full-board, do what he wants to do, not have inhibitions," Marsh says. "That's not only the way he gets characterized, I think that's the way his character is."

Lochte had injured his left knee before, while break dancing in 2009. That kept him out of the pool for six months. This time he was out of the water completely for about two months - and it was excruciating. He started to think, again, about calling it quits.

"I was getting pissed off because I wanted to swim," Lochte says. "I wanted to race. I couldn't be in the water. Your main focus is doing physical therapy, getting your knee healthy. Going from there. That was my main focus. At points during that time, I wanted to quit swimming. It was really hard for me. It got to the point where I felt like I was wasting my life, my swimming career away, because I couldn't do anything.

"I was just like, maybe it's a sign that my career is over."

***

What are your goals? What do you want to do in life?

Marsh asked his pupil those two questions, and promptly snapped him out of his funk. Lochte told him he wanted to change the sport of swimming, be one of the best swimmers ever.

Was he there yet? No.

So, Lochte plodded through physical therapy. He made it through days and weeks. He eventually returned to the pool in late December, and spent the next few months trying to return to form, focusing especially on developing upper-body strength. He swam against Michael Phelps at the Arena Mesa Grand Prix in April, and beat the 22-time Olympic medalist in his signature event, the 100 butterfly.

Weeks later, he retore his MCL, and that kept him out of competition until mid-July. The silver lining with the second injury, though, was that it didn't keep him out of the water. He kept a strap around his ankles, preventing him from kicking and forcing him to work on pulling. Isolating his pull was helpful, especially for his backstroke, Marsh says, likening the injury to making lemonade out of lemons.

"It helped because some of the stuff that's the weakest in my swimming was what I had to work on," Lochte says. "I think my legs are faster underwater than they've ever been, just because I was doing things right. â?¦ I'm still supposed to be recovering right now. I'm doing breaststroke, I'm doing everything. I'm kicking underwater. I'm doing starts, flip-turns, everything. I'm pushing it as hard as I can."

"Gregg Troy had warned me that Ryan has a phenomenal pain tolerance," Marsh says. "It's part of what makes him able to go, in races, places that other swimmers won't go. He'll dig into deep, deep pain to get where he's trying to accomplish. That's not a good thing with injuries. He wants to tell you everything is OK. As Gregg warned me, he often does say things are OK when they're not OK. He's just being that Superman he's used to being.

"This is a process that ends in the Olympic Games, not necessarily this summer. I think a lot of it, not only dealing with injuries but the growth and development is about him moving forward as a person."

In the week leading up to mid-July's Bulldog Grand Slam, a tune-up event for nationals, Marsh brings Boone in to talk to his group of swimmers. Boone wants them to focus on the four Ds that could take away from them performing at their best: distractions, distortion, dissonance and disengagement.

Each swimmer is asked to give an example of one D he or she is battling. Lochte picks distraction, and it's two-fold: "My knee, and competing against Michael (Phelps)."

All the Phelps stuff - the rivalry, the motivation, his comeback - that'll all decide itself in the pool. And so far, the knee looks and feels great, says Lochte, who will swim in six events in Irvine (100-meter freestyle, 200 freestyle, 100 backstroke, 200 backstroke, 100 butterfly and 200 individual medley). Trainers say he's cut his recovery time in half, and they joke they'd like to write a book about his knee.

"He can get to (100%) by the time of nationals," physical therapist Yordan Ascanio says. "It'll be interesting to see how much of Ryan actually comes out at in the moment, once adrenaline kicks in." â??